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Brandon Barrows Comics

How About Some Horror?

10/16/2019

'Tis the season, so how about some horror?

Let's start with MYTHOS, the four-issue Lovecraftian horror series I did with artist Hugo Petrus.

Cover of the trade paperback collecting issues 1-4, art by Dan Brereton

Hugo and I adapted eight stories--seven of Lovecraft's short stories and one novelette--spanning that range, from classic horror stories people are familiar with like "Pickman's Model" to fantasy stories like, "The White Ship" and "The Cats of Ulthar" and even one of Lovecraft's rare humor stories, "Ibid" about a fictional Roman philosopher whose world travels didn't end with his death.

Each story is drawn in a different style that Hugo felt appropriate for the piece and he really knocked it out of the park with all of them, so I hope you'll come with us as we go beyond tentacles and evil gods to explore the corners the mythos and the myriad worlds of Lovecraft!

Just print out this handy order form, fill it in and take it your local comic shop and ask them order a copy for you.

MYTHOS: LOVECRAFT'S WORLDS is a 100-page original graphic novel written by me, with interior art by Hugo Petrus, letters by Diana Leto and a gorgeous cover by the legendary Dan Brereton.

How could you NOT want a copy? ;)

Click here for print or digital and get yours today!

New Interview at Grey Dog Tales

10/9/2019

Duane Pesice interviewed me for Grey Dog Tales recently and sitemaster John Linwood Grant put in his own 2 pence about some of my work.

Head on over and read for yourself as we talk about fiction, truths, beer, pizza and everything in between!

PETTY LITTLE STINGS - Comic Central's Comic of the Week!

10/2/2019

Comic Central has awarded Petty Little Stings, the dark fantasy comic I wrote and Randy Haldeman drew, its Comic of the Week Award!

Petty Little Stings is a dark fantasy about hubris, in which a young man follows tavern tales, seeking out a legend, and finds more than he ever imagined. Gritty, nihilistic and slightly PG (for violence).

Get yours at Comic Central!

Stuff I Like, Part XXXXIV: the novelization of OCEAN'S ELEVEN

9/25/2019

You'll remember my fondness for novelizations of films, something I've mentioned often. Here's one I picked up not because of any affinity for the movie, which I saw once as a kid and barely remember, but rather because I was curious about the authors, especially George Clayton Johnson, who co-wrote (with William Nolan) Logan's Run, the original novel the movie was adapted from. I've read a few GCJ short stories in magazines from the 50s, but never an entire novel.

Well, what did I think? Read on...

Firstly, it's often hard to say, when two writers collaborate, what part of the work is the brainchild of which person. Sometimes, if you're familiar enough with a writer's solo work, you can tell. I cannot here as it's the only work of Jack Golden Russell's I've ever encountered. Together, though, these guys were pretty good. They also, by the by, wrote the original treatment that Harry Brown wrote the novel's screenplay from, which I find amusing: two guys writing a novelization of a film adaptation of their original story. But that's Hollywood, I guess.

At any rate, one of the first things that struck me is how much this reads like unformed, or perhaps not yet matured would be a better phrase, Westlake. Of course, the film and the novelization predate the first of Donald Westlake's comedy-crime novels by several years, but I do wonder if there was any influence on Westlake as the style really is quite similar.

So, the novel. It's good, but not amazing. It's amusing, but except for a few passages, not particularly memorable. The characters are mostly defined by unusual speech patterns and, in the case of Danny Ocean, Jimmy Foster, and Sam Harmon, by how others refer to them: everyone is or wants to be Danny's friend, so they're very hail-fellow-well-met; Jimmy Foster is either admired or reviled as the millionaire's son; Sam Harmon is simply "the pianist" to many people and "Danny's best friend" to others. One of the best-developed characters is, ironically, the character who's supposed to have the least in his head: Mushy O'Conner. Supposedly, he's a simple thug, but the authors give us a fair view of his real character, and fairly subtly, as he's torn between loyalty to his employer (the gangster Spyros Acedos, who has also employed Ocean) and Ocean, who he feels tremendous friendship and loyalty to.

The first thing that surprised me, and I honestly can't remember how it was in the movie, is how little is spent on the actual crime. Barely a chapter or two is allotted to it while we mostly spend on our time on the various relationships between fourteen or so people. And it was fine, it wasn't what I expected, but it was mostly enjoyable.

The other was how dark the ending of the novel gets. In fact, the last chapter almost seems like it came from another work, its tone is so bleak. But it was also a fine ending, one that the story, and especially Danny Ocean, earned, so I have no complaints.

You probably aren't likely to run across this book, as it's sixty years old and not particularly collectible or anything, but if you do, by all means, read it for yourself. Compare it to the movie and see how it stacks up. As I said, it may not be anything special, but it is enjoyable.

On My Mind: Rikako Akiyoshi's THE DARK MAIDENS

9/18/2019

On my mind today: a novel I bought on a whim because the elevator pitch--"Rashomon in an all-girl's high school"--sounded like it might have potential. Not only did it have potential, it blew away my expectations.

If you haven't seen the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, the story is essentially six characters telling subjective, contradictory and very self-serving accounts of their own recollection of a murder. Each character's story paints themselves in a positive light and casts suspicion on someone else.

The Dark Maidens is very similar, albeit a modern day version set in a Catholic missionary, all-girl's private high school in Japan.

Itsumi, the beautiful, kind, intelligent and exceptionally popular (think benevolent queen of the school) president of the school's literature club has died - violently. Whether it is is suicide or murder, the police have not yet determined, but rumors fly around the school that one of the six other members of the school's literature club has murdered her.

One week later, the literature club is meeting for its annual mystery stew slash original short-story-reading event, the event last of the school-year. Itsumi's best friend, Sayuri, formerly the vice-president and now president of the club, has decided to go on with the event despite Itsumi's death, knowing her best friend would want her beloved club to continue this tradition. The twist is that Sayuri has asked each girl to write, instead of a piece of original fiction, a story about their relationship with Itsumi.

What follows is, like in Rashomon, six stories, one for each girl, detailing how close each was with Itsumi, how wonderful Itsumi was to her and casting suspicion on another member of the club. Throughout these stories, bits and pieces (unbeknowst to the girls) of the truth are interwoven. They're not things you can easily pick up on while reading the stories for the first time, but by the end of the novel, I was genuinely impressed with how Akiyoshi seeded "facts" among the fiction.

Aside from that, the last arc of the novel, Sayuri's story, actually written by Itsumi before her death, threw several twists into the narrative. One, I suspected, but others I never saw coming and was not only surprised, but delighted. The last few pages of the work, especially, throw all the shadows and murkiness of what's come before into stark relief - and in a brutal fashion I could never have expected from the rest of the novel.

If it wasn't obvious, I greatly enjoyed the work. If I have any complaint, it's a personal one rather than a real critique of the work and it's only because I am a westerner reading a novel originally written for Japanese audiences, that being that there's a great deal of space devoted to explaining various Christian holidays and Catholic ceremonies. This is entirely understandable for a Japanese audience, as very few would be familiar with these concepts, but as a westerner, they sort of dragged the narrative down in a few places.

Don't, however, let that deter you. Overall, this is a great novel, one that has stood up to three readings (and I rarely read a novel twice, much less three times). The first time I read it, I literally couldn't put it down as I read and ended up reading it in one sitting. It's that good. Give it a chance.

StoryHack #4 Review - Praise for "Wild Yellow!"

9/11/2019

Just wanted to share that the first review of StoryHack Magazine #4, which includes my western novelette "Wild Yellow" is in - and the review was glowing!

Here's an excerpt of the review by reader Steve DuBois:

WILD YELLOW by BRANDON BARROWS. Sometimes, simplicity can be a virtue in a story. Barrows offers up an uncomplicated western that thrives on the exceptional quality of its line-by-line writing, a believably conflicted protagonist, and some legitimate insights into the nature of courage and cowardice.

It's very gratifying when a reader understands exactly what you were going for.

Read the full review here and get your copy of the magazine today!

On My Mind: Robert Bloch's THE SCARF

9/4/2019

We all know Psycho, of course, but Robert Bloch's first novel, The Scarf, is, in my opinion, actually a better piece of psychological crime/thriller/horror.

Originally published in 1947, twelve years before Psycho, The Scarf seems to have been quietly published and quietly slipped under the radar for many years. Bloch continued to write and publish, but it wasn't until Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho to film that many of Bloch's older works received renewed interest. (You'll note that the copy of the book I own was published by Gold Medal; the 60 cent price puts it squarely in the mid-60s, '66 in this case.) Some of those works were solid, but forgettable, such as Shooting Star, his one attempted at PI novel, and some were good, such as Spiderweb, which is a truly masterpiece piece of noir. What should be his defining work, though, The Scarf remains mostly forgotten somehow.

The novel is about Daniel Morley, a man with a self-proclaimed fetish for the scarf he always wears, which he received from his high school English teacher who--so Morley says--tried to rape him and he subsequently killed in self-defense. This earned Morley a degree of fame early in his life, but not the kind anyone really wants, and he spends the next decade wandering as something of a ne'er-do-well, committing minor crimes, grifting, to get by. No matter what he's up to, though, or where he goes, he always carries with him the scarf - with which he has killed multiple times, essentially whenever he feels a woman is becoming too close to him emotionally. Morley's dream, however, is to become a writer and he resolves to give up his past and start fresh, hopefully as a rich and famous novelist. And it seemingly works out well - for a while, anyway, until that old "fetish" rears its ugly head again.

The Scarf, told in a first-person narrative with an inherently unreliable narrator, is essentially the story of a man trying to save himself from himself and we're kept in suspense as Morley tries, taking increasingly extraordinary steps, to do so. Where Bloch's mastery of psychological fiction shows through, though, is that he doesn't try to make Morley sympathetic, as many authors would try to do. Morley is a deranged, vile scumbag. We're wondering if he'll succeed while hoping he doesn't and as Bloch, and Morley himself via his journal he calls "The Black Notebook," gives us more insight into his background, we wonder if all is as it seems.

Of course, since it's Bloch, it's not and one of my favorite things about this novel is that, unlike Psycho, the ending is completely natural to the story and the character. Don't get me wrong, I like Psycho a lot, but the ending, with its forced exposition to make sense of the scenario, felt just that - forced. When we are shown the "secret" behind Morley's history, everything in The Scarf neatly makes sense. It may not be revolutionary ending, but it was a good one and the one the story deserved.

Stuff I Like, Part XXXXIII: John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee Series

8/28/2019

I've talked quite a bit about John D. MacDonald here. As a reader, I have something of a complicated relationship with his work. Mainly, because while some of the 45 or so standalone novels, and over 500 short stories, he wrote between 1951 and 1961 are brilliant, many are simply not good at all. Most writers' work fall in a spectrum between bad and good, with most of them falling somewhere in between. A great deal of JDM's output, however, falls closer to "bad" than "good" on that spectrum - which has always mystified me, because when he's good, he's oftentimes amazing.

The Travis McGee series, for which he mainly known (despite the McGee novels being less than a third of his lifetime output) are like something entirely else, though. Not only is there not any bad Travis McGee, they're nearly all excellent. The first one I read, the second published, Nightmare in Pink, I almost had a hard time believing it was JDM. The tone of the work is so immensely different in so many ways from his earlier work, and the structure is entirely different from the format JDM worked out for himself and became comfortable with.

To be perfectly blunt, many of JDM's standalone novels are not novels in any true sense. Frequently, they are novelettes in the 10-15k word range prefaced with 35 to 40k words of (often unnecessary) backstory, simply to get the book to the required word-count range.

Travis McGee novels are not like that at all. They are true novels with plots and subplots (sometimes multiple subplots) and while the solution to the mysteries occasionally comes out of left field (such as The Quick Red Fox), JDM does seed these books with clues that an insightful reader can build upon towards figuring out the solution.

That said, the series stands apart from many other series by JDM's contemporaries in that they have continuity between them and Travis McGee, the unlicensed detective who calls himself a "salvage consultant" (because he will return your lost valuables to you, whether they are physical or not, when you have no legal recourse for half their value), changes along with them.

In the first novel, The Deep Blue Good-by, McGee is a professional beach bum without a care in the world. By the end of the novel, he's been emotionally devastated (leading to the events of the second novel), and it takes a couple more books for him to recover sufficiently - only for JDM to throw him into the wringer once more. The books deal with a variety of situations and crimes, but the themes of loneliness, dealing with encroaching age, and carving a place for yourself in a world that doesn't need any of us--at least not individually--resonate throughout the series. And with each book, McGee gets a little older, a little wiser, a little sadder, but he also becomes nobler.

He's been described as a modern knight-errant, and that's not a bad comparison. He is a roughneck, and perfectly capable of cracking heads, but it's a last resort, and he fells bad about it. He respects people. He especially cherishes women. Unlike the heroes of many detective series, he doesn't simply fall into bed. He has to be in love "at least a little bit," as he says in one novel, and while his relationships don't work out in the long-term, he remains friends with a surprising number of these woman and often they make repeat or even recurring appearances in later books as supporting characters.

McGee is probably one of the most realistic detectives in any of the works I've read - and I've read literally thousands of P.I. stories and books. That aside, the books are JDM at his absolute best. I've read more than half of the series and never found one yet that isn't at least good, and several of them are truly excellent.

I think what I'm trying to say here is that I love this series and if you like mystery fiction with something more, you will, too.

New Fiction: StoryHack Magazine #4 is out!

8/21/2019

The new issue of StoryHack Magazine #4, the magazine of neo-pulp action and adventure stories, is out now and contains my western novelette, "Wild Yellow!"

Inside this issue:

HawkeMoon (fantasy)
by Sidney Blaylock, Jr.
The captain of the King’s Guard vows to kill the assassin after the death of the King. There’s only one problem: it turns out she may not have been the killer.
Island Rescue (thriller)
by Spencer E. Hart
College-age Frank Mason accompanies his father to the private island of a reclusive billionaire and his lovely, yet lonely daughter. When armed men storm the house, what can they do to rescue their fathers?
Beyond the Temple of Baktaar (adventure)
by Jason Restrick
Three years ago, Sam Walters emerged from those ruins, alone, unable to discover what had happened to his friend. Now, as he fights in the trenches of France during World War 1, a mysterious apparition in the night hands him his friend’s journal.
Wild Yellow (western)
by Brandon Barrows
Clint Hagar never encountered a foe he couldn’t beat with bullets or fists – until he met the desert, alone and afoot. And though he survived, something inside of him has broken and he must now battle both his own fear and self-doubt while trying to protect a small, isolated town from the outlaws who terrorize it.
My Foe Outstretched (sci-fi)
by Misha Burnett
In a future world two men fight a duel in the ruins under the city. The rules are simple–two men enter the tunnel, one man leaves.
Alpha Equation (sci-fi)
by Julie Frost
A young werewolf, an abusive alpha, and a new pack–in space.
The Bouncer’s Tale (crime)
by Jon Mollison
Trapped in a life as muscle for a crime syndicate, Robert “Bomber” Robinson struggles to maintain his humanity during the second worst night of his life.
Retirement Plan (sci-fi)
by John M. Olsen
A retired military veteran settles down on a distant planet away from his old life only to find that violence is a universal trait. Old habits resurface as he is forced to step up and defend his neighbors.
The Spirit of St. George (fantasy)
by Damascus Mincemeyer
In an alternate 1922, a biplane squadron must engage in aerial combat with dragons that are ravaging the American Rockies.

Click here for print edition!

Click here for digital editions!

Get yours today!

On My Mind: Charles Williams's A TOUCH OF DEATH

8/14/2019

I've read a number of Charles Williams novels, but the first I read is still my favorite. I've been thinking about A TOUCH OF DEATH and how I need to reread it soon. So it seems like a good time to revisit it here, too.

Charles Williams is mostly forgotten today, except by "hardcore noir fans who really dig deep" as one reviewer said. I guess I'm one of those people because as far as I'm concerned, Williams deserves to remembered as the author of some of the finest, purest noir I've ever read. Of the seven or eight Williams novels I've read, A TOUCH OF DEATH is absolutely his best - and that's saying something, since all his work is good.

The protagonist is Lee Scarborough, a one-time football star who failed to go pro after an injury. He meets a bathing beauty who convinces him to take part in a heist with her - the money is already stolen so stealing it from the thief won't result in any problems. It's not like she can go to the police, right?

That just sounds like a recipe for disaster and of course, it's all downhill from there. But man, what a ride it is.

One of the things about noir that many people fail to recognize is that noir is not just crime stories - in fact, there doesn't technically have to be any crime involved in a story for it to be noir (though, of course, there often is). Noir is, essentially, people with doom hanging over their heads--often doom of their own making--struggling against hopeless odds. And that's exactly what Lee Scarborough is up against here.

Once a winner, now a many-times-over loser, Lee has any number of chances to walk away from what he knows is a bad idea, but he convinces himself to go ahead anyway and keeps on losing. Right from the start, the supposedly-simple heist is anything but, and as things keep getting darker and the stakes keep getting higher, he digs himself into a deeper hole trying to find his way back to the sunlight. Does that ever work? Of course not, but we wouldn't be reading if it did, I suppose.

While Lee is the protagonist, arguably the real star of the novel is Madelon Butler, the would-be-target of the heist. She is the coldest, toughest woman in any fiction I've read - maybe the coldest character ever. She's almost inhuman she's so cool and unflappable. For all that, you can't help but be fascinated by her, even if you can't like her. Her machinations throughout the novel--sometimes obvious, sometimes so subtle it'd be easy to miss them--are incredible and really drive the story. In the end, it turns out she was the 'hero' all along. And her dialogue, whether she's needling Lee or trying to seduce him, is brilliant. I hope Butler was created wholly from Williams's imagination rather than someone he knew, because a real-life Madelon Butler would be insanely dangerous to even know.

I don't want to give much away about this book because I want you to read it. This is the first Charles Williams novel I've read, but it absolutely won't be the last. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this book. If you like noir, pulp fiction or just a good story, you won't regret it for a moment.